After decades of selling player jerseys, NCAA president Mark Emmert declared Thursday, amid a growing Internet discord—bow, people, to the power of Twitter!—that the NCAA was done making millions off the names of student-athletes.

It just so happens the NCAA is up to its ears in a multimillion-dollar player image/likeness lawsuit with former UCLA basketball star Ed O'Bannon and other former and current athletes. It just so happens that after years of no one really looking—or even caring—at the process of selling jerseys, a social media match was lit, a fire started, and the NCAA saw more negative publicity rising against it and decided to bail.

I mean, who do you trust more in this day and age than the NCAA?

So let's recap, shall we?

It's now not prudent to make money off a Reggie Bush jersey; the same Bush whose misdeeds landed Southern Cal on NCAA probation. But it's still fine and dandy to severely penalize a football program for a criminal act—not an institutional act—without ever investigating?

It's now not OK to make money off a Cam Newton jersey; the same Newton who, along with his father, Cecil, made a mockery of the NCAA rulebook on the way to winning the Heisman Trophy. But it's still dead-on accurate during an NCAA investigation to take the word of a convicted felon if he says something twice?

Somewhere, in some swanky boardroom, O'Bannon's attorneys are doing backflips. The NCAA already was playing with zero hope of winning the lawsuit; this latest abject humiliation just raises the amount of punitive damages the organization will be forced to pay.

Anyone who has followed the NCAA with any regularity knows the organization is routinely emasculated legally (see: restricted earnings coaches; Rick Neuheisel's "gambling") because it is the definition of dysfunctional. The left hand not only doesn't know what the right is doing, the left doesn't even know there is a right hand.

So when it gets really ugly; when decisions that are made impact not only the future of the organization, but the welfare of its student-athletes, this wonderful group of well-intentioned men and women does one of two things: they dig in deeper, or they capitulate.

The problem is, they dig in where they shouldn't and capitulate where there's no need.

They've been selling jerseys for decades, and now, because it looks bad and because they're in the middle of a mega lawsuit, it's time to cut bait? Understand this, everyone: The NCAA just undercut its entire argument in the O'Bannon case.

If the NCAA truly believed it is right in owning the image/likeness of student-athletes, why in the world would it bow to selling jerseys, of all things? Instead of doubling down and insisting the tradeoff for the privilege of attending a university for free—and all the free perks that come with it—is the NCAA using a player's likeness to make money to support other sports and other university projects, the group just skulked away from the argument because Twitter got all sideways.

How embarrassing. How utterly shameful that a group of university presidents—men and women who are some of the brightest minds in academia—haven't a clue when it comes to decisions that will shape their organizations for the foreseeable future.